And death is the most ordinary thing in the world.  It is as common as births; it is of more frequent occurrence than marriages and the attainment of majorities.  But the difference between death and other forms of human experience lies in this, that we can gain no information about it.  The dead man is wise, but he is silent.  We cannot wring his secret from him.  We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which gathers on the rigid face.  As a consequence, when our thought rests on death we are smitten with isolation and loneliness.  We are without company on the dark road; and we have advanced so far upon it that we cannot hear the voices of our friends.  It is in this sense of loneliness, this consciousness of identity and nothing more, that the terror of dying consists.  And yet, compared to that road, the most populous thoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert.  What enumerator will take for us the census of dead?  And this matter of death and dying, like most things else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own fears and hopes.  Death, terrible to look forward to, may be pleasant even to look back at.  Could we be admitted to the happy fields, and hear the conversations which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that to conquer death a man has but to die; that by that act terror is softened into familiarity, and that the remembrance of death becomes but as the remembrance of yesterday.  To these fortunate ones death may be but a date, and dying a subject fruitful in comparisons, a matter on which experiences may be serenely compared.  Meantime, however, we have not yet reached that measureless content, and death scares, piques, tantalises, as mind and nerve are built.  Situated as we are, knowing that it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on it curiously, at times.  Nothing interests us so much.  The Highland seer pretended that he could see the winding-sheet high upon the breast of the man for whom death was waiting.  Could we behold any such visible sign, the man who bore it, no matter where he stood—­even if he were a slave watching Caesar pass—­would usurp every eye.  At the coronation of a king, the wearing of that order would dim royal robe, quench the sparkle of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald’s cry.  Death makes the meanest beggar august, and that augustness would assert itself in the presence of a king.  And it is this curiosity with regard to everything related to death and dying which makes us treasure up the last sayings of great men, and attempt to wring out of them tangible meanings.  Was Goethe’s “Light—­light, more light!” a prayer, or a statement of spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the fact that the room in which he lay was filling with the last twilight?  In consonance with our own natures, we interpret it the one way or the other—­he is beyond our questioning.  For the same reason it is that men take interest in executions—­from Charles I. on the scaffold at Whitehall, to Porteous in the Grassmarket execrated by the mob.  These men are not dulled by disease, they are not delirious with fever; they look death in the face, and what in these circumstances they say and do has the strangest fascination for us.